A Tale of Two Towers

[cachelapoudre]

In May I completed a CVA Tower Pistol kit I had purchased at a garage sale. The result was a nice looking and shooting .45 cal. ball and cap Tower Pistol.

I recently picked up another Jukar barreled Tower Pistol that was also made from a kit. This one had many things not going for it, especially in the "fit the hardware to the wood" department.

The finish was a combination of polyurethane/varnish/you-name-it. The nose cap had been butchered with two machine screws and the barrel tang was 1/4 of inch below the surface of the stock.

Last weekend I took the time to work on the pistol and this is how it looks like today.

Now I have a "you" and "me" dueling set of Towers ready for a presentation box. Yes, I know dueling pistols are suppose to be identical but my set is made for "contestant #1" and "contestant #2."

The CVA kit barrel was finished with a Plum Finish.

The "other" one was blackened using the bleach and boiling water method to get the black coating.

My next two projects are a CVA Kentucky Flintlock and a Hopkins Allen Underhammer rifle.

cheers,

 

[Ken Cormier]

Cool it is always nice to see pieces like this rescued. Thanks for posting.

 

[lee marrin]

Great final-finish job on both guns, Cache!

Many years ago I had a .45 smoothbore CVA Tower pistol, almost identical to your brown-finished gun. An idiot friend put some insane overloads in it, despite my protests. The barrel held together fine, except the tapped holes for the screws that hold the fore-end nosecap to the barrel stripped out. So I affixed the fore-end to the barrel by putting two 4-40 flat-head screws in clearance holes in the ramrod ferrule, and drilled/tapped new holes in the barrel.

Eventually the mainspring broke, but a friend repaired it by putting an big ugly blob of solder on the busted mainspring, and I continued to shoot it for a few more years.